Press

What If the British Vote No?

02 May 2005
Foreign Affairs
In June 2004, the member states of the European Union concluded the negotiation of a treaty that, if ratified, would establish a European constitution that would make substantive changes to the way the union works. For the first time, an individual would be appointed president of the European Council, overseeing...

Europe will survive a French Non

Mark Leonard
20 April 2005
Foreign Policy
It's easy to argue that the European Union (EU) has been in a state of crisis since its inception more than 50 years ago. France voted “No” to European defense cooperation in 1954 and vetoed British EU membership in the 1960s.

Financial headache

Alasdair Murray
01 April 2005
E!Sharp
Significant progress has been made in liberalising financial services. But Alasdair Murray argues that the EU risks losing sight of the potential economic gains to be made by going further.

A British No would destroy more than the treaty

16 March 2005
Financial Times
If opinion polls are a fair guide, all European Union countries will ratify the new constitutional treaty - except Britain, which seems set to vote No in the referendum due in mid-2006.

Europe: the new superpower

Mark Leonard
18 February 2005
The Irish Times
The world that emerges in this century will not be centred on the US or the UN, but will comprise a community of regional clubs led by the Europeans, writes Mark Leonard in London.
In the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC, a middle-aged woman with a weather-beaten face and...

Get your coat Mr Blair – you've just been asked to leave the EU

17 February 2005
European Voice
There are a host of ifs and buts. But the UK might, just might, be asked to leave the European Union if British voters reject the constitution, warns Charles Grant What if current opinion polls are a good guide to voting intentions in the ten member states that will hold...

A concrete strategy for mending fences

Charles Grant, Philip H. Gordon was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution
17 February 2005
International Herald Tribune
For the past several years, the conventional wisdom has been that the United States and Europe have grown apart, that the end of the cold war and 9/11 have produced a strategic divergence that is impossible to overcome.

Tangerine dream

Mark Leonard
12 February 2005
Financial Times
The man I went to see in Cairo is now in prison. I had seen Ayman Nur, the leader of Al- Ghad (The Party of Tomorrow), in the pride of his growing fame and success: at the peak of the growth of a movement which he created and which attracts some of the brightest spirits in Egypt; in his home, amid the clutter of his wealth and in the company of a wife who is also a partner in his work.